Some people just don’t care about others, but they’re smart enough to fake it. And those people tend to rise into power: politics, law enforcement, high-level business, etc.
Is there any way to detect this kind of person before they get in those roles? Or are we stuck just hoping they mess up and reveal themselves later?
Are there screening tools or policies that could even come close to solving this?
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I mean, you could argue that sociopaths want power and smart sociopaths, by definition, get what they want, and thus have power. It’d be nice to have powerful people who aren’t sociopaths, but I don’t see how we could accomplish that. I’m guessing if we suggested AI be in power, people would complain
More involvement from those that are currently uninvolved. For every sociopath attempting to gain power, we have like 10 apathetic people that just don’t care anymore. If those same people cared just the bare minimum, the impacts would go a long way.
That sounds easy, but having sociopaths in power seems to feed the apathy, making things worse over time.
I would love this thought experiment to be fruitful but I know it can’t be.
That being said… you would need to handle the issue at the root. The root being “no sane individual wants to run for office due to the disgusting nature of American politics”.
You can be the smartest person, the most even keeled type… but half the country will hate you regardless. Then the media will always lie about you, your family and anything else to help keep the population in the dark about the real workings of it all.
I would think that trying to measure how empathetic someone is, or giving them a psych screen that disqualifies you based on certain condition is just an invitation for abuse. People in power that put morality above what the best political move is don’t stay in power for long, anyways. Assume everyone in power will act sociopathically, and find a way to have the system work regardless.
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You abolish the structures that allow power to be centralized.
You have smaller businesses where the workers collectively make decisions. Where there are no managers and no outside shareholders to allow power to flow to the ruthless risers.
You move from representative democracy to direct democracy. Rather than electing officials who are unaccountable apart once every 4 years, you vote for policies or you vote for re-callable officials with a policy list that they have committed to implementing.
As part of that you push as much power as possible to as low a level as possible. If a decision effects a street or a neighborhood, and only that street or neighborhood, then it should be made by the people who live there. You can extend that to a district and a city and county or state.
These aren’t Utopian ideas. Every revolution from 1789 on-wards has started or catalyzed with these goals; and each time the power hungry sociopaths have prevented these ideas from sticking, replacing “change the system” with “change the master”.
Eventually though, we’ll get it right.
I think every child should have support by professional psychiatrists as part of their schooling, who guides them how to live life without hurting themselves and others unnecessarily. Those who really don’t care about others can be guided to see how it benefits them to be kind to others around them, which many sociopaths do learn.
Also, someone clinically Machiavellian should be have a warning note recorded, and when they’ve received a few of these it should bar them from certain professions and positions in which someone truly self-obsessed and lacking empathy can cause serious harm. Since a complete lack of empathy is visible on scans, perhaps those notes would be the call to scan whether they are medically limited in empathy, before they are black listed (since further support may reverse the issue if its not a medical deficiency).
I don’t expect to see that system, its just the best way i can see to protect society from people who crave power harder than any ordinary person would and so are most likely to achieve it, and wield it irresponsibly.
If it can’t be solved socially, perhaps the medical community will come up with a way to enhance/create empathy in their brains and all children can be scanned and treated if needed.
There’s a very old idiom that seems relevant here. “Trying to shut the barn door, after the horses have fled and the barn is on fire.” The really hard part is coming to terms with the fact that our socio-economic systems are all wealth driven, and exploitation, cruelty, deceit, flagrant lawlessness, and such are always going to be profitable. Far more profitable than being an ethical company. Industry will always attract sociopaths at the highest level, because sociopaths get the best results for shareholders. When the sociopaths control the power of the purse, every other check and balance is irrelevant. So long as we systemically place growth and shareholder value above all else in our economic system, we are going to end up led by sociopaths eventually.
Here is psychopath vs sociopath. Sociopathy is a symptom. It is how someone behaves. They can grow up a kind, loving person, but the dynamics of their position may require that they suppress their goodwill or honesty. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. The only way is to structure power in a way that goodness is incentivized.
Psychopaths are the kids who torture puppies, and we need to find a way to screen for those.
I think the only way is to dilute their influence with more regular folk. How we get and keep regular working class folk involved in political life is an eternal question.
In politics: you have to combine democracy with education. An uneducated population is a threat to democracy, which is why (especially in the US), autocrats will cut funding to education.
In business/workforce: same answer, but with a twist, because corporations are generally not democracies, so you need people that stand up to power-hungry people.
My pet theory is these people aren’t actually that good at faking or that hard to catch. Neurodivergent people are actually excellent at identifying or even countering them but so many rising to the top is a side effect of the marginalization of those who aren’t neurotypical. (This also applies to other types of minorities too, as in, you get more misogynists in power when you marginalized women, not a direct comparison, but you get my point.)
Sociopaths aren’t very smart. They are not a necessary evil. They are not just embodying the way the world works. There are many myths created by sociopaths to justify their own existence.
The solution is very simple: people need to talk to each other about real things and be suspicious of those who don’t want them to. All of the necessary changes will happen naturally because sociopathy is a disability that thrives only when people are not being sociable.
We can’t.
Why?
The system we currently have in the majority of the world is designed to reward people with those traits and differentiate them from psychopaths is not an easy task.
And hell, average people tend to use the term lightly, there are psychopaths and there are assholes, and both go to the top for the very same reasons.
The consumerism , the ultra capitalistic companies, the unethical science organizations, politics, social networks, mass media, society in general… All of them are constantly telling people their only worth is to make money, be superficially beautiful, and support those already in power.
Remembering what humans figured out over a millennium ago; the people in power least deserve it and the people who should have power don’t want it.
Good people rarely seek power. It’s not in their nature. Because the kind of power that matters is the kind that decides lives. Not just national leaders. Governors, mayors even are given the power and tools that decide who lives and who dies. No good person wants that on themselves.
We also reward narcissism and sociopathy. We do. We like the drama, we like seeing people take what they want. We revel in cruelty, it’s just not as obvious as when that meant gladiators slaughtering each other.
Most people never think about it and their role in ensuring it keeps going. But it’s not that hard to spot the fake. Plenty of us saw Sinema for what she was or that Theranos nut or Fetterman or obviously Trump. Train your intuition like any other muscle and don’t let them fool you.
You can detect most but it’s hard to detect the most dangerous one’s actually. The highly socially/cognitively intelligent one’s can do basically CIA level spy training.
Though we do have many tools to measure emotions such as facial expressions measuring, fMRI’s, and old school lie detectors. However, as a society we have deemed those tools as not ethical to be used (in most cases) largely due to 5th amendment type of rights. However, we do use them for secret clearances. So, their use are not beyond legal reach, but we are conservative in their use for obvious reasons (their potential authoritarian abuse can be greater than their ability to prevent authoritarians coming into positions of power).
Ya I worked for a diagnosed 85% sociopath, you can’t defeat them because they use money to force people to do things for them. If you want to keep sociopath out of power you need to redo the whole money thing or make poverty illegal so money has no power.
So these people are extremely controlling and ruthless when using and exploiting people. They also happily weaponize other people’s kindness to enslave them.
Its simple. We stop them from running. We replace this childish popularity contest that throws up failed tv hosts and lifelong politicians as our only choices.
Not unlike the military draft, or jury duty you select people from the population that have the qualifications for the post and they serve a term.
That means the minister of health will be someone from healthcare.
Finance will be someone with training in that and so on.
People will serve in the post unless they can prove that doing so would seriously damage their life. just like jury duty.
Or if you cannot escape the need for an ‘ election” you make all candidates to make their proposals available to the electorate and have failure standard for each. They would need to state what they feel needs changing, how they intend to do it and how they will pay for the change.
This way you know exactly what you are voting for. A proposal not a person or a party.
Then implement term limits. If the person cannot accomplish what they were elected to do it two terms. Then its not going to work.
What people have forgotten is that politician is not a job. It should not have a pension. the idea behind representational democracy was just that. Someone had an idea they felt was good and others would want. So they served time getting it done and then went back to private life. This allows another new generation of people with new ideas to serve .
>Some people just don’t care about others, but they’re smart enough to fake it.
If they’re really good at faking it, then they’re not meaningfully distinct from actually caring – other than the ‘ick’ of knowing/suspecting they’re a sociopath.
If they’re really bad at faking it, then you can campaign/lobby against them based on said ‘ick’.
Oddly, a sociopath capable of successfully camouflaging themselves as a normie might actually be a better politician than many of the alternatives.
Neurodiversity includes all kinds. Learn to live with the psychos and the sociopaths – they’re sure as hell not going anywhere.
The de-stigmatization of sociopathy and psychopathy have to be first steps. We’re never going to be able to incorporate fringe elements as long as we treat them as supernaturally evil beings. Maybe sociopaths are exactly the people we want in certain places of power, just with guardrails to prevent them from using their superpowers against the rest of us. They are there and they are going to stay hidden for as long as they know we want to root them out. Watch X-men or just remember like two seconds ago in our history when sexual divergents were similarly stigmatized.
Immediate citizen oversight of positions of power. A panel of people drawn from the general pool who passed certain criteria with the respect to the tests I outline below>
Personality testing for positions of power. These would include IQ tests, emotional maturity tests, psychological tests, empathy tests.
Politicians need to be nominated from the general pool and never self nominated. No more Insider nomination. No more crony nomination.
Anyone who really wants a position of power probably shouldn’t have that position of power. Pathological personalities are attracted to positions of power.
There are things that we can do but the pathological personalities currently in positions of power will never let this happen.
Sociopaths & Narcissists both.
A psychological screening process would have to be made Law to qualify for eligibility to run for office. The Layman’s version of such a psychological test would be the Myers-Briggs 16 Point Personality Test. I’ve quizzed a Covert Narcissist (predominantly Female in this category) and she fell into the INTJ classification.
As the DSM identifies Narcissism as an incurable mental illness common sense would dictate this to be a no brainer.
But this country is run by the very sub-humans such as bill would prevent. A situation perfectly suitable for and designed by such “things”. Unfortunately the only true recourse is the old rout that has been taken for all of human history when a system designed by the mentally ill to benefit from the suffering of the masses arises.
Revolution
Probably can’t
The key is controls and checks in place to monitor and control their power
Even better to make good use of it
I’d argue that sometimes hard decisions must be made that are difficult for an empathetic person to execute
Sociopaths still fear consequences
The problem I guess is that they keep trying to defund and take the teeth away from the organizations designed to keep them in check
Silo and limit power bases: Term limits, require government officials to black box their assets while in office, stop insider trading, limit campaign finance, pass legislation that further separates the division of power…
Trying to stop them from getting power is a fools errand; limiting their power and possible damage is the best approach.
Peer pressure. Then a sociopath has to at least seem to not be sociopathic to avoid getting kicked out like Nixon.
Dies not work when an entire political party becomes sociopathic, like now, or other bad times
Of course there are ways to detect them. People were screaming to the rooftops that Trump was a sociopath long before he got elected. He “messed up and revealed himself” hundreds if not thousands of times along the way. He got elected anyway.
Sure, there are screening tools and policies we could implement. But to implement them, we’d need good people to get into power. With sociopaths in power, we absolutely won’t get any kind of reform.
Some laws that might help:
That might at least help with sociopaths in politics, though not much.
If you’re asking about some kind of brain scan screenings, those are technically possible. But sociopaths could surely find their way around them fairly easily, and even turn such screenings into witch hunts against good people (claiming that they failed the test but covered it up).
Possibly the most effective option: Japan has far fewer sociopaths than the US (1% of the population rather than 4%). It’s been speculated that they have just as many people born without empathy, but there are societal structures that effectively replace empathy in terms of behavior. For example, the concept of “face” could cause would-be sociopaths to act honorably out of pride, feeling that cruelty would debase them and lead to social stigma.
In other words: completely overhauling our society may help. America is (ideally) a land of dreams and freedom, but it’s also a land where con men freely prey on people with big dreams. Sociopaths thrive here.
I have a family member in a very high political position, and he isn’t a sociopath but still his political work harms good people and he is disliked/hated by many people I know, including me, because of who he is as a person. The worst part is he thinks he is a good person who is fighting on the right side. So it’s not just sociopaths, it’s many uneducated and egotistical “normal” people contributing to destruction. I have had talks with him and there is no talking sense or giving them facts to see their ways. He also came from a poor bad upbringing, and none of my family would ever be considered to be rich or high class. He is an example of you don’t need money and power to affect a big group of people negatively, you can just be immoral and have the right skills. Ask ten family members or people in close contact anonymously their opinion of and relationship with a person, and you can weed most out.
theres literally so many ai out there, it could easily be found via basic scanning of texts or personality typing everyone which is already happening. why isnt it out there is the real question, i assumed it was!?
Id argue we probably want them in power to some extent. What you’re actually wanting to avoid is their ability to selfishly abuse their power. You want the selfish ambition to align with what is good for the people as much as possible, so that the way to more power is benefitting the people. Thats the theory of democracy.
If it worked, wed have competent policy makers, but it requires a competent electorate. Which we do not have ( and likely never will).
I don’t think you can.
I mean, what are you going to put some mandatory empathy test up in front of political campaigns? You know how easy that would be to fake?
And I genuinely don’t think our population is smart enough to maintain a democracy in this information era, where we get “news” and conspiracies bounced around in social media algorithms.
People genuinely think liberals are “evil” and Biden was a pedophile.
The current administration is just a symptom. DC is chocked full of sociopaths and our population is primed for populist-fascism at this point.
As far as I know, psychiatrists can diagnose sociopathy, psychopathy, and narcissism.
I would 100% support screening for those for public service and politics roles.
I don’t know if there’s a right answer to this. This is a pretty good article on the subject, with some proposals: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jan/opinion-why-we-always-get-wrong-political-leaders-and-how-get-right-ones
I think the answer to this isn’t how to keep these people out of power, but how to incentivize good behavior those who are in power no matter how sociopathic they are. My answer is neutral laws, processes, institutions. Make it so that the way to protect your own rights is to play by the rules that protect the rights of others and the way to advance your self interests is to play by the rules that protect the others.
Find and root out the ones who share your beliefs and lead by example. There should be self correction within groups that take responsibility for their most extreme members who hold the most extreme beliefs. It’s not gonna happen from the outside in.
Rather than focus on keeping the baddies out, I think we need to make a robust system that can thrive despite having sociopaths in positions of power.
In other words, we should not hang the fate of our country on always electing good leaders. We’ve had lots of bad politicians in the past, but we mostly either got rid of them or recovered from the damage they did.
And—lucky us!—we have this fantastic case study of the Trump administration which provides us a textbook of all the ways our system can fail to deal with bad leadership.
For example, going back to the Nixon administration, the blueprint for turning the country into an oligarchy is drafted. Then the media Fairness Doctrine was eliminated, leading to Rush Limbaugh and then Fox News. Then Citizens United freed up unlimited cash to politicians, essentially making laws and the legal system directly for sale. The steps to get us here are pretty clear, and obviously tragic.
Anyway, at each step, the checks and balances, the media watchdogs, academia—they were all weakened. Somehow we have to rebuild our national immune system, and then make it even more robust and transparent so that the next sociopath will just end up working really hard to stay in power, but be prevented from doing harmful things. We actually need the energy these greedy people bring —we just need to detoxify them.
through unity. the only way these people are able to maintain power, orchestrate global events and maintain status quo is through misinformation causing division, and therefore distraction from an organised, united front in tackling issues that matter (instead of getting caught up over trivial shit that’s out of their control). until such time, enjoy the shitshow, bro.
I get the sense that you think these people are rare in powerful positions. On the contrary, I would guess that, in the US at least, every president in the past 50 years and the vast majority of members of Congress in that time frame have been sociopaths.
So it would require a huge overhaul of the system, to do something that has never been done before. In short, it isn’t happening.
What we can work on is limiting the damage they can do.
I think the political system is structured in a way that advantages sociopaths and places those who are honest at a disadvantage. If you are willing to just say what people want to hear then you are at a huge advantage. Life is not fair but that’s the reality. Cheaters win.
So I just start from the assumption that they can not be trusted (I will be right 80% of the time). That they are manipulative sociopaths. Then they have the job of convincing me they are not. Guilty until proven innocent.
Why am I so harsh? Because as I said earlier, the system favours sociopaths. The system filters out those who are not willing to stab in the back. So honest good people will be less likely to be there in the race because they will not sell their souls to remain.
“Is there any way to detect this kind of person before they get in those roles?”
Good questions. But i do think the issue does not reside there, i think it belongs to the people who let them through.
I mean even the appointment of the current people in government (US), many like Patel, Hegseth, etc were clearly unqualified and downright childish and even dangerous in their daily behavior. Yet they are where they are right now.
Sortition
A system where representatives are selected by lottery from a pool of all adult citizens and limited to one term only.
Quit electing them.
Listen to them when they speak, cause the whole frigging world knew he was going to be what he is – how did it come as a surprise to you?
Society needs some immutable rules that must permeate everything we do. Like for example short term limits, government funded classes and simplification efforts to make politics more accessible, electronic voting.
What I’m trying to say is that if the world’s banks, credit card issuers and Amazon can perform millions of secure transactions daily then I truly believe that we can implement a working direct democracy. The problem isn’t technical, powerful forces are working against it.
Unfortunately I fear there will be a smarter Republican president in the future than Trump that’s even more sociopathic but cunning. Some Americans are dumb…
There’s a book dedicated to this… Check out “Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths-And How We Can Stop!” by Bill Eddy.
He also has many other books on high conflict personalities, like “Five Types of People that Can Ruin Your Life,” which was my first introduction to him when I was going through a divorce.
Idk man
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
“You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?”
I made this comment below but figured I’d put it in its own thing too (hope that’s not against the rules) but here is my question:
Anyone familiar with research around game theory and Nash equilibrium for this type of stuff? Like can’t we come up with a system that is mathematically optimal so that our systems are not purely wealth driven but something like “generating community” and “having people realize their seemingly disparate views are compatible with others”?
I think it’s broader then just sociopath. I think personality disorders in general are problematic. Personality disorders are learned maladaptive behaviors. They learned to act in a way to get there way or to help them exist in the world. That might include being highly manipulative, pathological lying, or changing facts to fit their feelings. Are those the folks we want in office?
We don’t talk about personality disorders nearly enough. Most don’t know about them until you run into someone with a personailty disorder. It can change who you are and how you see the world. With enough experience, you can pick up on it earlier.
Imo, the way to do this is to understand where power comes from. “Power” isn’t a new concept. It’s been around as long as our system has been- and those in power have used their power to entrench ideas and “virtues” into the public consciousness that only continues empowering them and their cohorts. Personally, it’s why I consider myself a socialist. I’ve come to understand that socialism has been demonized by the very same empowered people who fear solutions to wealth inequality- because obscene wealth is how they tend to take power in the first place.
Personally wouldn’t stop a smart sociopath from getting in these position. A smart sociopath has self preservation in mind. If you’re talking about the current climate…those aren’t smart sociopath, I don’t know how y’all didn’t see that coming.
Simple answer you won’t. It was sociopaths who created power structures the way they are….and never underestimate how not giving a fuck about negatively effect others can benefit someone attempting to gain power….its literally their game built by them with their skill set in mind.
So the solution is actually to strip positions of authority of material benefit. Many early human societies have traditions of doing things like this with their leaders. Authority/power and wealth need to be decoupled.
Dilute the power so it is less attractive. One Representative for every 30,000 people. Regulations must be read aloud by the local and national heads of agencies on the steps of their HQ once a quarter or they expire, the same for laws.
The whole thing is backwards and I don’t know what the fix is. Those who seek power are precisely the ones that shouldn’t have it. The people that should be in power are the ones that want nothing to do with it becuase they’ve already realized what really is important in life.
Sociopaths dont care about pain they cause or collateral consequence of their actions.
The only way to combat someone who doesnt care is by caring. Care-bear style, through cooperation and friendship.
In a world of apathy like the one we’ve created, the antisocial sociopathic types will always win.
I think you’d have to change the system so it doesn’t reward them from the ground up. And reverse all incentives. Currently all incentives encourage having them in power.
Currently, people who have a lot of money can lobby the gov’t and change the system in their favor. They have power.
People who tend to make a lot of money can easily tend towards being somewhat sociopathic, or at the very least they are people who can easily tend towards being very assertive and dominant and conscientious and are selfish on some level.
I think some possibilities would be to insert checks and balances at every level so that the people who are affected by decisions at the top always have leverage to oust them.
For example…most businesses are monarchies. You could have it to where only the workers can approve bosses…so if there is a super shitty one, they can get rid of them.
Another example might be, direction of companies must be determined by a board of workers.. so work life balance can always be maintained instead of it just being all for the owner’s desires.
For govt. Maybe make it so it’s really unappealing for ppl who want money. Maybe everyone in govt can only use the baseline health insurance and services the poor use, and have to like like monks while in office and sell off all businesses and property.
My general rule of thumb is that you have to sociopathic to run for office, just look at how their kids and uninvolved family members catch strays. They run in spite of this, and that seems pretty sociopathic to put the ones you love the most through this
Those at the highest level of power should also be subject to highest levels of transparency by a rotating board that can anonymously demand evidence of the power-holder’s decisions at any time. The salary of a group (Those in power and those that represent the organization, aka, board) should be a lump sum that is distributed to each member dependent on their relationship within the boardroom and the outcomes for all that depend on their decisions. This will directly interfere with a sociopath’s innate desire to hoard wealth and power.
“Those who believe it’s foolish to study politics are usually governed by fools who do.”
Plato
Basically, if you think you can do a better job, do it. Encourage others to join you. Be the change you wish to see.
There is absolutely a way to keep sociopaths out of office. Listen to what they say and read about their past. Never give leeway to a politician. They don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. They are like roaches. If they lie once, they’ve lied 10,000 times. Demand integrity.
Very few people have sociopathic disorder. Most people do, however, have sociopathic traits coming from experience in their life, particularly the early formation of their childhood
Make people less vulnerable to the type of charisma and abuse that people with antisocial and other cluster B tendencies dish out:
Teach people to have healthy boundaries
Get people to understand meritocracy is a form of shame based coercive control and teach them to unshame themselves.
Teach everyone the skills to build and engage with community with the goal of building social safety nets
Teach everyone critical thinking and talking with our peers for a second sober thought.
Solid consequences for people with antisocial tendencies who cause harm.
Extra supports for vulnerable communities
The list isn’t exhaustive.
There are psych tests for aspd and dark triad traits. I note sociopathy is not a recognised condition.
Unfortunately, these traits are valuable in some contexts. Callousness yields dispassionate decision making, disagreeableness, aggressiveness and pride when paired with competence makes effective negotiators and project managers, manipulativeness yields influence and when these abilities are directed to furthering a country or organisations interests, it’s pretty beneficial on the whole.
What suffers is caring for the common man. But what you have to give up in exchange for empathy and kindness is too large on the whole. So we are where we are.
Seeing that we can even keep the dumb ones out, i think the better/smarter question is:
how to we keep dumb ppl from voting for sociopaths.
It’s amazing how half a nation can spot a con-man/ a snake oil salesman, from a mile away, and the other half is taken in showmanship and sees “a savior”, a daddy, an Elvis..
And sadly, the later half seems predisposed to tribalism and partisanship. whereas the first half SUCKS at self promotion, because cheat ponding is beneath anyone who GOES HIGH. It would seem stupid pride is the one thing we have in common.
One way to start:
Release the Epstein files. Release the Epstein files. Release the Epstein files. Release the Epstein files. Release the Epstein files. Release the Epstein files. Release the Epstein files. Release the Epstein files. Release the Epstein files. Release the Epstein files.
Any screening tool would be gamed by said sociopaths, and honest people may just view themselves harshly. Screening tools are NOT a diagnosis, rather a starting point for figuring out if further psychological probing would benefit a patient. Screen tools “screen out” some of the things that don’t fit. They’re wildly imperfect.
Then one must worry about “who would be administering these tests”. Is the group/person passing judgement overtly bias? Implicitly bias (IE: lying to themselves about their bias)? Do they have someone else they want to “win” and are thus eager to eliminate competitors? Or are they just taking simple bribes?
This is along the same line of logic as to why “the US does not make hate speech illegal.” It’s not like anyone likes hate speech. We have constitutional safeguards for those so that there isn’t some tribunal dictating what can or cannot be said. That is too much power, and is prone to being abused (and would be a target for corruption).
I think in principle the answer is yes, but the difficulties are numerous.
In particular, this set of people tend to have a chameleon-like adaptability that frustrates efforts to permanently identify them heuristically. Indeed, a system set up to identify them would ironically to co-opted by them and used against their enemies.
So I think the key is to
* support systems of government that have distributed power
* support (classically) liberal socio-political values
* and avoid politicians who have a history of acting in antisocial (manipulative, criminal, etc) ways
Prioritize Anti-corruption at all times
Set up laws to promote common good. Eg CEOs & board are taxed as usual up to 25X the lowest paid employee/contractor, including bonuses & options; everything after that is taxed at 80%. They can be rich and wield some power but they need bring everyone with them too, abuse in any form is verboten.
I don’t think that’s really the problem. The real question is “how do we teach smart sociopaths to participate in society instead of trying to ‘beat the game?’”
For a sociopath? Make the risk higher than the reward. I suffer from ASPD and it’s a disease that turns everything into VERY transactional arrangements. Literally, if The Funny Thing happened to the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels of this planet, more people with ASPD would avoid positions of great power just because, as I like to say, “the math isn’t right”.
It actually seems pretty obvious to me that when these people are voted in, it’s an unconscious self destruction on the part of the voters.
Why do people smoke cigarettes? Why do people drink? Underneath the illusion that it’s “cool”, it’s to jump headfirst into obliteration and say “fuck you”. It’s coping with a harsh reality.
Most people don’t understand why they do the things they do. They’re drawn to psychopathy, superficial charm and abuse. Humans are endlessly living out their childhoods.
If we’re to change this, we need to stop teaching young children to ignore their instincts, we need to stop instilling “obedience” and encourage free thinking, and we need to get rid of a LOT of really dangerous people. Of course, this is extremely unlikely. So it is what it is. The world’s fucked.
Past history, when Romni was running against Obama I saw a documentary on Obama helping with social issues and Romni doing charity work ,he couldn’t talk about because of religious beliefs, yes a bit foggy on details as it was a while ago but I gained much respect for both men!
Lotteries. It’s really that simple. Rotating roles, short terms, it’s a public duty. If you’re system and government are actively supporting you, these roles (alderman’s, treasurers, state secretaries of varying administrations) make alot of sense.
As is people are chasing these jobs being guided subconsciously by their ego and the pursuit of survival. You can’t expect consistent good performance if we’re also going to instate artificial feelings of duress
Given we can’t even keep idiotic sociopaths out of power, I genuinely do not think it’s possible to keep smart sociopaths from power at this current moment.
Fuck all that screening nonsense!
Just make positions of power 1yr terms decided by raffle. Yeah you’ll still get sociopaths, but not for long, and equally often you’ll get their antithesis.
Furthermore, this ensures that you most often end up with the most normal people in power.
In your industry/place of work, asking for a psych eval to be part of every promotion would help. Huge companies do this. Those psychopaths start somewhere, though (except nepo kids i guess). But don’t ignore sociopathic behaviour at home or at work. Keep calling it out. Going along to get along is not how we get out of this.
There are three seniors housing buildings in Toronto, Canada, which are dedicated to studying the ways of malignant narcissistic personalities, particularly to learn how they can destroy other people’s lives and it should be remembered that most of American sponsored experimental programs in the past have been done in Canada
Smaller government would be a solution. Breaking down power structures that have grown way out of control for the people that handle them. We need more roles that create more checks and balances between them, slicing up the pie of power into smaller slices. Much smaller slices. Include military in that.
Sociopaths will go where money and power is. Much more stringent transparency and regulations on political finances would go a long way.
Having campaigns paid for only from allotted money from the government, and going back to cutting corporate donations back.
All of that is of course not easy to do. If politicians were not permitted to live wealthy lifestyles—if they couldn’t have outside business interests and investments, if they had a guaranteed decent standard of middle class living, but no more, it would go a long way.
Politicians would be considered people serving the country, not the other way around.
I can dream, can’t I?
We start believing the people who warn us about them. There are always people who are victimized by them but we ignore them because sociopaths are those bigger than life personalities we idolize and we continue to glorify them right into power. Look at all the women who warned us about Trump, and the hundreds of contractors and small business he cheated his entire business career. They all told us exactly who he was but we made excuses for him and chose to believe every ridiculous lie he told. Its our fault these people get power because we idolize sociopaths ans drama. That’s why TV has been taken over by twisted reality shows that just bring out the worst in people and then exploit it for ratings.
You can’t; this is the problem with authoritative structures. The ambitious will always find a way to work their way to the top of any power structure. The ONLY solution is to limit the power the person has once they reach the top.
Don’t create a society where people are rewarded for lying. Don’t incentivize sabotaging others to get the one position hundreds or thousands are vying over. We’re currently doing both those things on steroids. I cannot get a job right now and the most common and most upvoted advice is to lie about my experience.
Put a stop to the societal acceptance and full on encouragement of the “me first, screw everyone else” attitude and work towards a society where every decision is for the good of all.
First thing is we need to recognize as a population if these people deliver in good faith or do they try to “technicality” their way out of it or outright not do what they promised. People need to be taught how easy it is to manipulate people by just saying what they want to hear. Teach them the words that are normally used, the techniques that are normally used. In my opinion, the education system needs to be playing a role in it. Teaching logical fallacies, teach about how propaganda is sold to the people, learn to identify these extremely effective methods of manipulation.
Its a radical solution but restructure society to minimize if not completely eliminate positions of institutional power. Develop and maintain decentralized decision making bodies that function from the bottom up and require/allow for equal input from all members of the community. Shift from representative to direct democracy.
Lots of people are going to hate this answer but I think its the best/most reasonable solution to what would otherwise be an unavoidable problem.
The honest answer is that if you’re raised in a similar environment and then do a fuck-ton of therapy and healing work, you can spot these types of behaviors years before they’re made clear to other people.
The issue is that the majority of people are blinded by the person’s status and/or talent and/or charisma and until multiple very egregious and provable incidents happen, most folks will look the other way. And frankly, a shocking amount of people legitimately do not care about bad behavior, so long as the person involved is able to provide enough resource (through talent, status, charisma, etc.) to their community. Essentially, people who can spot these things basically have to be willing to pay attention to, keep a record of, and get fairly solid evidence of the behaviors until they’ve happened enough times for people to be willing to care. And even then, status often wins out (people who intend to do harm know this, and it’s absolutely a factor in why they seek status and power).
I don’t have any easy solutions.
For Business:
Decision makers in academia and industry would have to seriously factor in lived experience when hiring/admitting/accepting applicants. Productivity/success would have to be viewed within the context of the applicant’s life circumstances. Critics might say that goes against merit-based principles, but it really doesn’t. It just contextualizes it. Ex: Who’s the better runner? The guy who ran 6 miles on a treadmill in an air conditioned gym or the guy who ran 3 miles uphill in 100 degree heat? Personally, I’d take someone with a 3.0 gpa over someone with a 4.0 depending on their lived experiences.
For Law Enforcement:
Similar approach to business. This field will always attract some sociopaths looking for outlets to exert control, but I think that’s a small percentage of officers. Of course that minority could do great harm given the nature of the job, but there are already a bunch of public suggestions on methods of reducing that risk. There are also sociopathic doctors, lawyers, pilots, etc. Basically any profession of prestige where your ego is stroked and you have the power of life or death. It’d be impossible to completely eliminate them from some of these fields, but would be possible to identify them with the intent of harnessing their talent while limiting their ability to cause harm.
For politics:
We’re pretty fucked. Winning an election gives you legal power that can only be rescinded by voters. Any attempts to limit eligibility would likely be found to be unconstitutional.
I’ve also heard some interesting arguments that society actually needs sociopaths. The goal shouldn’t be to have them all jobless, homeless, etc. because that’s not achievable for highly motivated sociopaths. The goal should be limiting their ability to cause harm to innocent people.
I’ve been taught by a business owner once. He taught me some things about how “big” businesses operate, or at least how they should theoretically operate; not precisely businesses with earnings in the billions, but those whose monthly net income from their activities is tipically measured in the tens of millions. Money that the individual person can only dream of ever coming close to.
A lot of these “big” businesses use concepts from the economy of scale. Theoretically, there exists a curve of cost vs units produced for any activity that aims to produce anything of value, and the business may operate at the lowest point in this curve; this is, the point where the units produced are such in quantity that the cost per unit is the lowest possible. The market then decides the price of this product, and companies usually hire other companies to determine this price of the market for this product. And the difference between this price and the lowest cost in this curve is called the “utility”, within which is the net profit.
All businesses base their rentability on maximizing this utility, or they should, at least theoretically speaking. If this utility is too low, the business is weak and might go bankrupt during sudden market price changes. If this utility is really high, then that’s more money to reinvest in the business, and the business grows and becomes stronger against the will of the market. And of course, more profit, and the owner wants that.
Maximizing this utility often involves the use of automatization, and heavily relies on prioritizing efficiency over all else. People hate these things, because it screws them over. It reduces their salary, it worsens their working conditions, or it takes away their job entirely.
But the reward is an ever increasing utility, that makes the business grow. And the owner will almost always choose the growth of the business over all else.
The owner only sees numbers on screens, and they only see the utility grow, and grow, and grow, if they do this, or that, and this, and that. “The theory says this metric has to be under this threshold, so I should do this, the theory says that, so I must relocate the payroll of 50 people to this other thing and send them home, the analysis I bought tells me this about the price, so adjusting the cost of production accordingly, I should fire another 50 people… Utility, I must maximize the utility, utility, utility, utility…”; It’s not sociopathy, it’s disconnection from reality. You don’t see the value of a person through a number.
You can’t filter them out. The system is built around rewarding this cold behavior. You’d have to change the system, and then, what will you replace it with?
You know what countries do? They put up legislation to shield the workers from this madness. That’s… That’s probably the only thing you can do here. Probably.
Missing the question. Sociopaths can be good people and do good things for community so long as they logically understand it and it suits them.
The real question is how to stop abuse of power, wherever it lies.
By actually holding them personally accountable both criminally and financially and ending immunity laws. Passing more anti corruption laws. You make it more difficult for people to harm and get away with it and you will have less people willing to risk it.
This is actually the question I tried to answer in a report for the government and of course because most people working in policy and politics are raging sociopaths, narcissists, or psychopaths they ridiculed it and the learnings went nowhere. My experience working in politics has shown me that people absolutely love these horrible people because they are pretty distanced from them in everyday life. It takes a well informed, active populace that follows politics instead of the Kardashians to get rid of these people who ruin our lives with white collar crime.
I don’t think you can necessarily keep them out of power all you can do is have your own power and reputation to stand on
I don’t try to fight for power at work cause there are too many nuisances it brings into the equation BUT I have my own way of winning in the end
I worked in a few clubs and bars now work I. Warehouses
Sociopathic people were always around as guests and my co workers in the clubs
long story short if I’m not gonna be promoted because of people cutting me down at the knees it was fine…
I just plotted to let them overwork themselves til they let everyone around them down let them be responsible for my mistakes etc
I also get my own special treatments (not a raise or promotion) I can show up whenever I want and make my schedule as I pleased while also being at the very bottom of the totem pile
I make people owe me more favors than I’d owe them
I overdo a lot of things and win hearts and confidences from my superiors and I work to keep my position and even became irreplaceable to even people who want to stomp on me
Keep your friends close keep your enemies closer
I don’t play games I play dumb.. I also dont care enough about the workplace since it is literally just to pay bills
Sure being high in power is great and all but im not running the country I just work in a warehouse now
well one way is to build a system that regardless of how careless and self-interested a person is, they cant mess peoples lives up that badly. because its very possible that in looking for one type of person, another gets caught in the crossfire or it just plain doesnt work. it’s difficult but it’s sure going to be more robust than “pass a test to prove your not one of the Bad People” which has its own issues since that line can be moved pretty easily.
Intelligent people generally don’t want societal power because of the bullshit it comes with. Being president is a pretty crappy job, all things considered, which is why politicians usually end up being corrupt, morons, or mentally unstable.
BELIEVE PEOPLE WHEN THEY TELL YOU THINGS.
Sociopaths absolutely get sniffed out. But when that one person at work points out a pattern of behaviour, everyone else tells them they are overreacting. Then all the flying monkeys come out and bootfuck the person trying to point out the obvious.
For example – see how the ch!ld-f*cker who bragged about Grabbing pussy got elected as president TWICE.
iS tHeRe SoMeWay tO deTecT this?
Big problem is likely too that power has its own pathologies. One is that it attracts people with psychopathological personalities and, also that it invariably seeks to centralize itself.
The only people that really want that level of power and are willing to do what it takes to get that power are just inherently extremely Machiavellian. Good people don’t tend to want power that much, and for those that do; the system isn’t set up to allow anyone to get it in a fair way.
I think you answered your own question, the vast majority of the population isn’t very smart and if you have someone that’s smart and manipulative, you have a recipe for disaster
We need to stop incentivizing cruelty and lack of compassion with monetary gain.
If you are completely devoid of empathy, it’s no problem to buy someone’s house from the state who hasnt paid their taxes, up charge the rent by 200% and rent out the home to a family of 4 never fixing any issues.
You can sell heroin and buy a shopping complex with the money.
Sales tactics become much easier. Imagine fucking over someone for thousands of dollars by selling them a useless item or shit health insurance. Imagine how easy it would be to triple the cost of their life saving medication and deny their claims.
Capitalism, as it’s run in America, incentivizes sociopathy and rewards it. That’s how we stop people from gaining power who are cruel, stop rewarding shitty behavior.
From what I know, which isn’t a lot, a sociopath is hard to pinpoint because they are smart and care nothing for anyone else and they have mastered lying. It’s hard to pinpoint a sociopath or a psychopath until the aftermath, from what I understand.
You probably won’t. They want it more than you. The way to protect our future is to take power away from heirarchal positions and return it as close as possible to the populace.
How to do that? Hard to say, and every communist group has a couple ideas.
You dont, they get in power for a reason whether you like it or not, what some would call sociopath others would call the ability to make the hard decisions the majority of the population are too weak to make
You’re not stopping sociopaths from getting power by catching them early. That’s wishful thinking. They don’t trip alarms, they build the alarms and pretend to trip on them. They know what empathy looks like. You can’t out-interview them or out-vibe-check them or psych-test your way around it cuz they’ll ace all that. The only way to slow them down is making sure the system doesn’t let anyone get too much power without real accountability. Transparent decisions, strong oversight and a culture that rewards honesty over charm. If a structure rewards ambition over ethics, sociopaths will win that race every time. So fix the structure.
Work on your mental aptitude, your mental strength and grow some backbone to stand up and smell the psychopathic vibes and know what to do about it .. oh that requires hard work and humans are lazy f***s in that department , yeah so that game is already lost I’m afraid 🐒🙊
THAT is really the question, isn’t it.
you don’t.
what you do with smart sociopaths is you keep them busy so they don’t interfere with normal peoples’ lives, at least as much as possible.
i think maybe that’s what capitalism is good at.
the bulk of the sociopaths aren’t in government, they’re in “leadership” positions in corporations.
only the worst sociopaths get into government.
those would have been the princes and courtiers in the old world.
now they’re vice president of marketing.
it’s not a perfect way to keep them busy, but it works to some degree.
I think we should encourage pro social behavior in our society. People are taught the things that get labeled as a sociopath by violence in different forms. Also having institutions which have more equitable power structures with less hierarchy that doesn’t change like switching roles.
This is more work also for people who don’t want to have responsibility while the people who want to be in charge have to learn more to cooperate with others. This is better for teamwork and leads to groups with better ideas, productivity and happiness really. There are more conflicts and potential for things going south with less voices contributing to point out issues.
If we paid as much attention to our candidates as we pay to sports, the Kardashians and other shiny objects, we’d have fewer sociopaths in our government.
I don’t think a majority of people in power are truly sociopaths, they’re just unable to empathize with the people they have power over because they’ve never been in a situation where budgets or hard work really mattered. Sure, working hard gets them another 20% in assets or whatever but if they don’t work hard, their children are never going to go hungry or even have to go without the latest status symbol they have their eye on for example.
If this is so, then the solution is to stop making policies designed to attract investors into acquiring various companies, and instead focus on making policies designed to encourage people capable of innovation to innovate, and build something that lifts them up to the level that they can influence policy, regardless of where they started from.
By the way “encourage” in this context usually means “profit from”.
Solution is implemented. 10 years later: how do we keep smart sociopaths from becoming the ones in charge of that solution.
But that’s an all-or-nothing way to look at it. Because society, as it exists now, actively helps/rewards such people. We could start whittling away at that, but we won’t, because the current state of affairs is convenient for the sociopaths who do well in this system.
I’m not even talking just high-level government. A local church or even an extended family will bend over backwards to protect such people and throw their victims under the bus, in the name of group cohesion.
The answer is the same way we could find violent criminals ahead of time.
In public schools, we have health screenings for vision, hearing, and scoliosis.
We could also have mental health screenings. People with antisocial personality disorder can have symptoms detected detected as early as age 4.
The questions are, do you really want the government building mental health dossiers and people from K-12, and what is going to be done about it if a problem is detected?
No reliable screening tools yet.
Until people stop responding to rah rah slogans and simplistic ideologies that have little to do with reality
Until we not willing to gaslight ourselves and force ourselves not to and therefore are resistant to gaslighting by others
Manipulative dark triad lying type people will win.
There were literal AUDIOS and VIDEOS of Trump talking pervertedly about his own daughter, and saying ridiculous things like ‘grab her by the p=sy’. There was proof, but guess what? Nobody cares, we all just want a decent income, family, food and water, and comfort. All his broken promises were the reason many voted him im guessing. And he promised to stop tue Russia Ukraine war, BY giving Ukraine to Russia, even tho we all thought he was gonna make peace between them the right way. All of our leaders lowkey suck, but we become choiceless as what matters most are leadership skills, and the ability to manipulate people
I think it takes a type of bravery and decisiveness that the good people of our society have collectively not organized to tackle yet, to their detriment.
If we made mandatory a dark triad test for politicians/people in high position and we block ascending those who score high. They should do whole panels of personality and empathy, the test should contemplate that these people are manipulative and will find a way to pass the test clean, so you have to outsmart them. But unfortunately I think the main problem is that common people who share traits with sociopaths/narcs/bpd tend to naturally support them no matter what.